Unnatural - The Heretical Idea of Making People

Can we make a human being? That question has been asked for many centuries, and has produced recipes ranging from the homunculus of the medieval alchemists and the clay golem of Jewish legend to the cadaverous mosaic of Frankenstein's monster and the mass-produced test-tube babies of Brave New World's Hatcheries. All of these efforts to create artificial people are more or less fanciful, but they have taken deep root in Western culture. They all express fears about the allegedly treacherous, Faustian nature of technology, and they all question whether any artificially created person can be truly human. Legends of people-making are tainted by suspicions of impiety and hubris, and they are regarded as the ultimately unnatural act, offering a revealing glimpse of changing attitudes to the relationship between nature and human art. n Unnatural, Philip Ball delves beneath the surface of the cultural history of anthropoesis the creation of artificial people to explore what it tells us about our views on life, humanity, creativity and technology, and the soul. He argues that to call something unnatural is to make a moral judgement that has its origins in religious thought....